


RELOAD

by Confabulatrix



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Body Horror, Brain Modification, Computer Virus Kaiju, Dirty Chrome Future, Gen, Technobabble, Virtual Reality, Zombie(like) Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 18:45:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2743211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Confabulatrix/pseuds/Confabulatrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>brawler_yukon session in progress. Do you wish to enter session?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>y</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	RELOAD

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Astrodynamicist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Astrodynamicist/gifts).



> Commissioned with the prompt: "something cyberpunky and lightcap-centric."
> 
> I hope this satisfies your requirements, m'dear!

 

_we're the unfinished, the unfeared, and we're never pursued_

 

 **s.m.pentec.raf/bfr/c.o.l/** **loc30uyc0060310625/uk://** _Why did you_ volunteer _? We're air force, not SEC jackies._

 **l.f.pentec.raf/kvbg-mil/loc1652745/us://** _Exactly, AIR FORCE. The Lightning HBCI is full bastion-prox and proofed, we slayed the Nessus-Calix test._

 **s.m.pentec.raf/bfr/c.o.l/** **loc30uyc0060310625/uk://** _This isn't a dragon Luna, it's not like playing St. George when we were kids, it's_ _—_

 

_Connection lost. Attempting to reconnect in 3...2...1._

 

l.f.pentec.raf _not found._

 

 _Domain_ kvbg-mil _not found._

 

loc1652745 _not_

 

 

 

13.08.2113

 

Caitlin officially regretted hard-jacking in her emergency VoComm line. So convenient when she was out and committing coordinated acts of treason on the go. So inconvenient when it was five in the morning and she was trying to sleep. She fumbled into consciousness batting at the air and the blinking green letters of her HUD. _Incoming call from SCHOENFELD, JASPER. Accept?_

She flicked her gaze to the right to decline the call and remembered she had taken out her lenses hours ago. The blinking increased in intensity. "Ugh," Caitlin groaned, "fine, sure," and rolled over to reach for her glasses on her bedside table. With her other hand, she tapped the sub dermal switch behind her left ear to toggle her call settings to voice-only, and waited for the call to pass her security checks.

_Call connected! Thank you for using i_ _2_ _nonymous!_

"Caitlin?"

"Dr. Schoenfeld. Long time." She waited a moment, and said, "What do you want?"

"I need you to come to the lab."

Caitlin bit down the urge to ask if that was code, if _that_ was what they were calling it now. "Need?"

"It's important. Really impor—actually,is this call secured?"

"It's five in the morning, I'm hung over, insult me again Jasper and I'm going back to bed and blacklisting this number."

"It's about San Francisco, _Doctor_."

She sucked in a breath through her teeth. "What do you know?"

"I know you sign your work; you were involved in the Akeera Lo affair last year, Lightgeist." Caitlin went silent and he exclaimed, "Don't hang up, don't hang up! I didn't say anything then and I'm not about to start, I have a direct line on the data coming out of San Francisco and I want your input on it as soon as possible. I'm praying you'll see something we haven't yet."

 _Nothing_ was coming out of San Francisco. The whole bay area had gone black, the whole damn country was panicking, and if not for Sat mapping proving it hadn't been wiped off the map...

And Jasper wasn't religious.

"Okay, sure." She lifted her glasses to scrub her hand over her face. "I'll set up a connection, I'll be online in twenty."

"That's not... How fast can you get here? This isn't something I'm willing to risk sending."

"I'm in _Boston_ , Jasper. All domestic flights are grounded." She made a few quick calculations and pulled up her net browser. "Sixteen hours at absolute earliest on the first train out."

"I'll buy your ticket, Lightcap. Just _get_ here."

The connection ended with a chime and _Thank you again for using i_ _2_ _nonymous!_

Caitlin took a deep breath, swore, and _moved_.

 

 

 

On the paused screen, a red-haired woman in a pilot's flight suit screamed, frozen forever before the raised rifles of the Army cordon at the edge of the exclusion zone. Caitlin stared.

"Her name is Wing Commander Tamsin Sevier of the RAF," Jasper said, and swiped his hand across the screen to resume the video.

" _Hold your fire!_ " Sevier staggered forward and screamed. " _We're still human, hold your motherf_ _—_ "

Caitlin reached out to pause the video again and let our a long shaky breath. "Nothing's come out of the XZ."

"Twenty-six hours ago, she did."

"She said ' _we_.'"

Jasper looked sick. "She brought back a body." Caitlin looked back at the image, at the long shadows cast by twilight, and saw at last the arms slung over Sevier's shoulders.

"She didn't really carry a...?" Her throat went tight and she abandoned her question as Jasper went paler and paler. He minimized the video and pulled up another, of a young black woman in a white room, hair disheveled and wearing bloody scrubs, throwing her body against the one-way observational mirror. There was no sound on the second video, and Caitlin found herself both grateful for and alarmed by the eerie silence of the woman's snarl as the glass cracked.

"Sevier brought back Luna Pentecost's body," Jasper said. "They plugged it into a locked-down grid headspace, to figure out what happened. It killed–infected–two doctors and an Army SEC specialist. They got a visualization packet out. One." He pulled up one more image, a shadow made of white noise and _claws_.

"What the hell _is_ that?"

"I dunno." Jasper fumbled through his pockets and produced a bent cigarette and a lighter. "I'm hoping you have some ideas, though, because all we know is whatever's in there now?" Jasper's syllables rounded around the cigarette as he lit it and took a deep drag: "It's not Luna fucking Pentecost."

 

 

 

29.12.2113

 

"I was supposed to go in for the same upgrade after our vacation. I was putting it off because my hair's a lot shorter than Luna's... was. I didn't want to walk around California with a bald spot, the red's natural, 'm pasty-arse English, I'm a goddamned lobster in the summer, y'know.

"Luna's always been the responsible one. Gets things done on time, always, she files our reports, she did both her taxes and mine early this year just so they'd get done. She's the one who pushed for our whole squadron to upgrade, she wanted us to have bleeding edge, the most modern Brain/Core 'sets, the very best for the very best new planes in the free skies, that's my Luna, wants all the best for her best girls.

"'C'mon Tams', she says to me, 'we can do better'n some codgy tenner Anzu 'sets, wouldn't you just wanna try the Quetzelcoatl line and really ride the lightning?'"

On the recording, Sevier paused to swipe at her tearing eyes and swore, too low to be made out. "I should've gone in too, stupid stupid _stupid_ , we were supposed to go together or never, together or not at all, that was the goddamn promise. I never even got to see her in the dress, y'know?"

Caitlin paused the interview to wrap her hands around the back of her neck and dropped her head to the tabletop. In the bottom corner of her vision, her HUD flickered orange to signify a new incoming message from one of the engineers. She exhaled hard and closed her eyes to read it.

_Stacker Pentecost is downstairs. What do we tell him?_

 

 

 

31.08.2114

 

The incisions from Captain Casey's fourth session of Upgrade and Augment surgeries were still puckered red and healing when Engineering and Medical both signed off the all-clears to activate his second group of Brain/Core chipsets. Caitlin sat out the early calibration up in Observation with Sergio, still wheelchair-bound six weeks out from his third U&A due to concerns over his blood pressure.

"You don't have to babysit me up here, you know," Sergio said.

"Oh, I know."

Below them in the lab, Casey exclaimed, "Whoa! This is _so weird_ _!_ "

Caitlin rolled her eyes at Casey's enthusiasm and jacked into the lab's internal virtual grid network on her HUD to follow his stumbling progress. "Ugh, amateurs." At Sergio's questioning look she shrugged and said, "Did you honestly think I'm walking around with a street-legal kit? I bought my first Augment when I was sixteen years old, and that," she gestured down at Casey's first foray into dual-reality madtasking, "is about as interesting to me as unsecured relay apps."

Sergio raised his hands in surrender. "Preach, o muse. You should've seen my specs when I enlisted. Anzu would've been an upgrade but not much of one."

Caitlin nodded idly and pulled up Casey's activity reporting as Jasper and a few of the other engineers started spooling up a few of the Jaeger programs. His neural activity spiked for half a second, well within tolerable threshold but just a little too high for Caitlin's comfort.

She pinged Jasper, _He's running kind of hot, are you watching the neural load down there?_

_He says he's feeling good still, we're going to try initializing brawler_yukon._

In the lab, Casey gave his thumbs up, and Jasper lifted his hand to count down from five.

"Wait," Sergio said, "they're already—"

Jasper reached _one_ on his countdown, and Casey started screaming.

(Two days later, five hours after the Scissure variant appeared in Sydney, anti-kaiju coalition forces blanketed the city with the airborne toxin norcin and wiped the city's virtual grid. There were no survivors.)

 

 

 

04.01.2115

 

Before, the hardest thing Caitlin had ever done was breaking through sixteen layers of encryption, live, no console, to disrupt the skulljacking of a major political figure before she publicly assassinated another major political figure. For the good Doctor Lightgeist, nothing was impossible.

Now, the hardest thing was standing in a room of politicians and generals, watching Sergio D'onofrio go bravely smiling under a neural load he'd never be able to carry by himself, no matter how many safeties and non-standard mods she'd fought to give him; the hardest thing was standing there and doing _nothing_.

_brawler_yukon session in progress. Do you wish to enter session?_

_y_

 

The world went nova.

Caitlin opened her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first toe-dip into a greater self-contained cyberpunk au. I hope you enjoyed the reading of it as much as I did the writing of it, and that you come away with questions that aren't solely iterations of "WHAT JUST HAPPENED."
> 
> I love feedback, and if you have the spoons for it I'd love to hear your thoughts!


End file.
